Six weeks ago, here in Toronto, we heard the voices of the first cicadas of the summer of 2013…

Their distinctive sound seemed to have gone silent after a week of dreamy buzzing in the heat – because the weather turned cool and rainy, who knows? – but we’ve just now had several days of hot weather again, and the buzzing is back – beautiful “chamber-ensembles” of male cicadas in treetops, calling to potential mates. These are probably Magicicadas, so-called “periodical cicadas” at the end of their 17-year cycle (most of it spent underground feeding on the sap of tree roots, and only the final six to eight weeks lived above ground to mate and then die). Here in Ontario we are at the upper limit of the East Coast Brood or Brood II (whose range is North Carolina to Upstate New York). It is possible, too, that we are hearing adventurers-further-north from the Onondaga Brood.

The cicadas’ distinctive mate-calling sound puts us in mind of a song by María Elena Walsh.

Walsh described the song as originally “about life, an artist’s life. Sometimes you’re very well known, people adore you, and then the next day nobody knows you, no one loves you. That was the idea.”

“Como la Cigarra” was composed in 1972 but ten years later had re-appeared as a poem-song metaphor for survival – specifically, the survival of the Argentinian people as a nation emerging after years of fear living under dictatorships.

(A Special Thanks to The Wyckoff Journal for the quotation from Señora Walsh.)

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María ElenaWalsh

(Argentinian writer/singer-composer, 1930-2011)

“Like the Cicada”(1972)
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I was killed so many times. I died so many times however, here I am reviving myself. I thank misfortune and I thank the hand with the dagger because it killed me so badly that I went on singing. . Singing in the sun like the Cicada after a year under the earth just like a survivor, that’s returning from war. . So many times was I wiped away so many times did I disappear, I went to my own funeral alone and crying I tied a knot in my handkerchief but then I forgot afterwards that it hadn’t been the only time and I went on singing. . Singing in the sun, like the Cicada after a year under the earth just like a survivor that returns from war. . So many times will you be killed so many will you revive so many years will you spend despairing. And at that moment of shipwreck and of darkness someone will rescue you to go on singing.

. Singing in the sun like the Cicada, after a year below the earth just like a survivor returning from war.